The present invention relates generally to the field of capacity management, and more particularly, to capacity management in backup and recovery environments.
Backup and recovery systems are often designed to salvage inaccessible data from corrupted or damaged media and/or files when the stored data cannot be accessed in a normal way. Since backup and recovery systems can contain at least one copy of all data considered worth saving, data storage requirements can be significant. In the context of backup and recovery systems, capacity management activities seek to optimize performance and efficiency, and to plan for and justify financial investments of existing data storage structures in these backup and recovery systems. Generally, management activities associated with backup and recovery systems are labor intensive and sometimes inaccurate. For example, capacity management activities can result in misses, gaps, and errors in saved data.